Friday 10 February 2012 08.48 EST
First published on Friday 10 February 2012 08.48 EST

Near the rusting, abandoned steelworks perched on a hill overlooking the forlorn north-eastern town of Gandrange, trade unionists put up a gravestone inscribed: "Here lie the broken promises of Nicolas Sarkozy." The French president, fresh from his whirlwind marriage to Carla Bruni in 2008, had vowed that the state would save the factory and he would come back to help. Neither happened.

Instead, Gandrange has come to symbolise what one local deemed "all that is wrong with Sarkozy". His political opponents make symbolic campaign stops here, the unemployed struggle to pay their rent and the mood is grim. "People can't even bear to hear his name," said Yves Mougenot, a lorry driver. Last month even the gravestone was stolen.

The presidential election this spring hangs more than ever on the record-breaking unpopularity of one man. Sarkozy was elected in 2007 with a sweeping mandate to transform France with a Thatcher-style revolution, vowing to drag the country out of its old statist habits with an injection of free-market liberalism that would allow the French to "work more to earn more".

He was the most overwhelmingly popular president since Charles de Gaulle. Five years later, 70% of French people think his record is negative. Unemployment is at a 12-year-high, with almost one million more people unemployed than when Sarkozy took office. If François Mitterrand abolished the death penalty and Jacques Chirac kept France out of the war in Iraq, pundits are struggling to define what Sarkozy's legacy might be.

He promised to boost the average citizen's spending power, but up to 15 million French people now struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. Far from being given a state of grace because of the financial crisis, Sarkozy is personally blamed by France's audit body for a fifth of the rise in the public deficit. Schools are underperforming, social inequality is pervasive and racial divisions run deep. France is the world's most pessimistic nation about its economic prospects.

Sarkozy promised to lower taxes and ended up raising them. He defended the free market over the French social model, then turned resolutely statist, saying the French model had saved France from the crisis in capitalism. But he is still accused of weakening the welfare safety net. A majority of people feel he never intended to keep his election promises to reform France.

"Anti-Sarkozyism has become a real political phenomenon and it has taken on a cultural dimension, particularly among the young," said Jérôme Sainte-Marie of the pollsters CSA. " It's rare to see a president so profoundly unpopular and for such a long time: four years out of five. The reason is that Sarkozy set himself up as a man to be judged on his results and the French see no results on jobs, which is their over-riding concern, or on spending power, or even on crime and security: Sarkozy's specialist topic and part of his political DNA. Economically, people feel the efforts weren't spread fairly: there were injustices such as his easing taxes for the rich."

Even in his own right-wing camp, Sarkozy's re-election battle in April and May is seen as extremely difficult. The socialist favourite François Hollande has lengthened his lead, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Front National, is snapping at Sarkozy's heels. Privately, the president tells supporters "the favourite never wins". He is to launch his campaign next week with a strong right-wing slant on "values", proposing referendums on how to deal with illegal immigrants and the long-term unemployed. But he is avoiding discussing his record in power. The thorny issue of what became of his reform ambitions is left to his ruling UMP party, which has distributed 6m leaflets detailing Sarkozy's "top 10 reforms".

These include raising the pension age to 62, giving universities control over their budgets, limiting the impact of strikes by introducing a compulsory minimum service on public transport, expelling 30,000 illegal immigrants a year and banning women in the niqab, or Muslim full-face covering, from all public spaces. The prime minister, François Fillon, has defended the president's "courage" in other areas, including slashing more than 150,000 public-sector jobs, adding: "Maybe we didn't always go far enough." Some supporters feel reforms such as easing rules for self-employed entrepreneurs have been lost amid a muddle of U-turns or failures such as the ill-fated ministry of "national identity" or Sarkozy's crusade to deport Roma Gypsies.

For political analysts, Sarkozy has never recovered from personally "flashing his bling" at the start of his presidency: his lavish celebratory party at a Champs Élysées hotel and holiday on a billionaire businessman's yacht, his public romancing of the supermodel Carla Bruni, or giving himself a pay rise. He promised to put morals back into discredited French politics, then tried to parachute his student son into a key business post; saw disgraced ministers stand down over issues such as paying for cigars with state money, or the foreign minister who quit after holidaying with cronies of the Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali during that country's revolution.

One of Sarkozy's main reforms was to cap the tax paid by France's wealthy elite at 50%. But he scrapped the measure amid public outrage that France's richest woman, the L'Oréal cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt, had benefited from an eye-watering €30m (£25m) rebate. Judges were already investigating whether brown envelopes from the Bettencourt household financed Sarkozy's party.

Personal image holds the key to Sarkozy's re-election strategy. Last month, he held a three-hour off-the-record briefing with a few select journalists, to restyle himself as humble. "I'm not a dictator," he said, smoking not his habitual cigars but a cigarette. He said he would quit politics if he lost the election. On prime-time TV, he admitted having "regrets". He is working on what he has called a "hyper-intimate" confession, a mea culpa to the nation, to make him seem "more human", in the words of a spokeswoman. Hollande is styling himself as "Mr Normal" against the implied "abnormal" Sarkozy.

Sarkozy has launched a last-minute blitz of reforms, in part designed to eclipse his criticised record in office. This includes the deeply unpopular shifting of France's hefty social charges away from businesses and on to consumers by raising VAT. Supporters call it his "Captain Courage" phase, to show that the national interest of crisis-hit France is more important than his own popularity. It's about being "presidential" in the face of crisis, his last trump card. The support of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is crucial because Europe is one of the last platforms where he is taken seriously by French voters.

"His personal relationship with the French has deteriorated," said Emmanuel Rivière of the pollsters TNS-Sofres. "He was seen as someone close to the French, who talked like them." But his presidential stature nosedived when he famously told a man "Sod off, you prat" at Paris's agricultural fair. Conferences are springing up on the vexing question: what is Sarkozysm? "It's a style of politics," said Rivière, a kind of frenzy of action and announcements, but its substance is "complicated to follow", with no clear ideological line.

Political columnist Alain Duhamel called Sarkozy "wounded but not electorally dead". To win he must convince France he has changed. "Sarkozy isn't the same as he was in 2007," ecology minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet recently announced. Once again, Sarkozy has staked his success on personal transformation.

Quotes from Sarkozy's term as president

23 February 2008 "Sod off, you prat" – to a man at a Paris agricultural fair who refused to shake his hand. The video footage became a viral hit and raised questions over Sarkozy's presidential stature.

6 November 2007 "You! If you've got something to say, come over here and say it to my face!" – to a disgruntled fisherman who shouted at him during a walkabout in Guilvinec, Brittany. Sarkozy's outburst and use of the "tu" form was seen as a lack of self-control.

8 January 2008"As you guessed, it's serious" – his announcement at an Elysee press conference that the former supermodel Carla Bruni, whom he had met for the first time less than two months earlier, was soon to be France's new first lady.

26 July 2007 "The tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history … They have never really launched themselves into the future … The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time … In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress" – a speech in Dakar, widely condemned in Africa as racist.

5 July 2008 "Now when there's a strike on in France, nobody notices" – promoting his new law to ensure minimum public transport service on strike days. Trade unionists and struggling commuters were offended.